The vet has instructed Wilson to be sure that Maggie gets three hundred milligrams per day of omega-3 fatty acids, as well as prednisone, to maintain her appetite, and so, as she has each day since Monday, Ruth wanders into the living room with a pill-filled cream cheese ball in one hand and the daily stack of Christmas cards in the other. Normally underneath the tree, this morning Maggie is lying before the fireplace on the picnic blanket still spread on the floor from dinner last night. Picnics before the fire are something Isabelle has always loved; last night’s was the first of the season, and, Ruth thinks, the first in silence—but at least they’d gone ahead and picnicked anyway. The room still smells a bit of smoke, though the ashes in the hearth are long cold.

Maggie’s tail thumps the ground as Ruth squats beside her; Maggie lifts her head in greeting. “How’s my girl?” Ruth says, running her hands down the length of Maggie’s back. She offers the cream cheese, and Maggie gobbles it up, hardly bothering to chew. “You don’t seem so bad,” Ruth says, sitting back on her heels. “You’re going to be okay.” She takes Maggie’s ears between her fingers and lowers her face close to the dog’s. “You have to be,” she whispers.

She wipes her fingers on a Kleenex in her pocket, gathers the Christmas cards from where she set them on the floor, and stands, taking a step closer toward the fireplace to put the cards out on the mantle. She studies the faces of other people’s children as she stands the cards up one at a time. They sit smiling on a sunny rock in summer; they stand side by side on their skis, grinning from beneath their goggles; they sit in matching nightgowns side by side before the fire. She thinks of their own Christmas cards this year, the ones she bought at the Met of a lonely lighthouse standing in the snow—the kind of cards single people send out, or people without children, or people like Jimmy, whose card is next in the pile. His card has a drawing of a quiet house, candles in the windows, a wreath on the door, Santa headfirst down the chimney, visible as a red rear end and a pair of big black boots. Jimmy, she thinks. She wishes she had more time for him.